Recently, it has become more and more popular to create complex images through the utilisation of a computer system having a high resolution graphics display and a high resolution output printer preferably of a color form. The graphic image production industry is undergoing a rapid development and complex and sophisticated image production tools such as Adobe Photoshop (Trade Mark) are often utilised for the creation of complex images.
One important aesthetic quality of most images is a character font which conveys text. The design of character fonts is a complex process requiring sophisticated artistic judgements made by the designer. Traditionally, a font has consisted of a bitmap or an outline, the later typically being represented by spline data. The utilisation of font outlines often provides greater flexibility in scaling operations in that the one font can be defined for many different sizes by means of re-scaling of the spline data. Various designed fonts have become extremely popular, for example, Times New Roman, Courier etc.
Although fonts are well known and utilised in computer image generation programs such as word processing programs, or higher end graphics programs, they are generally lacking in one or more of flexibility, creativity and structure. As the user of the font must work within the pre-defined structure, this often leads to limited or blinkered artistic output results.
When designing a font, it is necessary to produce designs for each and every character within a font set. This is a laborious and time consuming task, even for the Roman character set, and the languages to which it applies. Further, when designing fonts for other languages, the number of characters within a character set can be extremely large (for example, kanji characters) and hence significant work, labour and expense is involved in the creation of font characters.
It follows that there is a need to provide a flexible and adaptable font structure which leads to increased levels of flexibility and utilisation. It is also desirable for the font creation process to be substantially automated, whilst still maintaining substantial artistic control over each character, thereby reducing the graphic designer's workload.